[CentOS-virt] Problem with CentOS 5.3 Xen and Windows Server 2008 HVM DomU

Mon Oct 19 18:19:20 UTC 2009
Ben M. <centos at rivint.com>

I am by no means an expert at this. I just have a lot of fresh wounds I 
learned from.

- Use NTP only in Xen dom0.
- Turn off NTP in Windows domU, force it to just use system time. It 
will stay current from Xen, at least that is what I see here.
- Check your xm dmesg, if you are getting NMI warnings from that dom# I 
am pretty sure that is the clock conflict and it bluescreens me. I fixed 
it with above.

- Maybe post your domU conf file for it too. Will compare to mine. I 
have been stable for a week now and the clock is running true.

- I will accept that you are using well under 4g ram as reported in 
Windows Taskmanager.

- How many vcpu's did you give dom0. I could NOT get Windows to run with 
two cpus without giving dom0 MORE than one vcpu. I finally let it have 
them all, I reserved cpu0 for dom0 and I have never seen it use more 
than one cpu and generally it will stay there in in cpu0/vcpu0. If 
anything overall performance is the same, maybe better. I do not think 
SMP will work if dom0 doesn't have at least 2 cpus/vcpus at its 
disposal. This is all stock Centos-Xen yum current.

- Make sure you don't have nosmp (toggled off) in your grub.conf.

- Keep your /var/lib/xen folder clean of vestiges from crashes.

Veli-Pekka Kestilä wrote:
> Ben M. wrote:
>> I had that issue when I first installed. The clock still acts up once in 
>> a while if I take the system down entirely for a few hours, which won't 
>> happen now that it is in the rack.
>>
>> This seems to work for me at the moment, with or without Xen GPLPV, 
>> though GPLPV "safens" your install (Registry Hive errors without it). 
>> YMMV and I am not shaken out yet!
>>   
> I have also installed the GPLPV drivers. But they didn't help with 
> crashes when trying to use two CPU
>> - I haven't tried a Win2K3 installation yet. So far I am very 
>> disappointed with Win2K8 and I'm calling Windows Vista Server here. 
>> 20gigs of partition space needed (excluding sql express) to just serve 
>> the first, static, web page? Gimme a break!
>>   
> Well the W2K3 seems to work without problems. Although those virtual 
> machines only use one CPU so can't know for sure.
> 
> Memory use really isn't problem. But the issue still remains that I 
> would need some way to get Windows 2008 to relax the timing requirements 
> for the CPU's. So that it wouldn't do the BSOD's on the missed clock 
> interrupts. And don't want to go back to 2003 as these machines will 
> most probably be running next 5-years with this os.
> 
> -vpk
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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